Predictions

One of the better matches to start off with this event, not the best of one for betting but I’m definitely excited to see North with aizy and OpTic with Hiko, unfortunately for the Americans I don’t think OpTic will be able to win this match, they lost stanislaw who was the key to OpTic’s success and now they don’t have a proper strat caller anymore, NAF won’t be nearly as good as stanislaw was, it will hurt his fragging as well.

North will also attend this event with a new player, they replaced RUBINO with aizy and technically that should be an upgrade, however RUBINO was a really good support player while aizy is more of a star player, so we’ll see how it goes, either way, they were already better than OpTic with the old roster, now their fragging power is even more insane, on top of that, North’s map pool is really freaking good, so yea I don’t really see too much of a chance for OpTic here.

North will be my pick here, I really feel like they’ll be way better than OpTic with that roster and they should start off with a win here.

Hard to call game to be honest. Both just changed a player and both will need a bit of time. Yes aizy played with them before, but according to MSL they had some players wanting to play the same spots so they had to make a compromise and people will be in new spots and new roles on some maps. Put a player out of his comfort zone and it doesn’t matter how good or bad they are as a player, they will not perform. OpTic have made NAF their IGL, a 19 year old with 80% hearing loss in one ear, it hardly sounds great. I think when things go wrong they will struggle and I can’t see them doing as well as they did any time soon. The map is hard to pick here. I can see it ending up on something like Cobble or Overpass. I would have to favour North but this could go either way, LOW on North for me.